New elements in PvE

So i was thinking of ways to spice up PvE and make it a little different than the standard boss fights. I thought i would run this past the mmo champ community and see what people thought.

Imagine if you step into a raid, lets say for now its a 10man raid, and on the floor is a golden ring. It doesn't belong to sauron, but everyone wants it. Now imagine that PvE raid fights are built around this one person in the raid having a powerful item that all the NPC's want to get. The goal at the end of the raid is to destroy the ring.

Boss fights are tailored around it, so say you're fighting a boss and adds spawn and they all run to try to get the player with the ring and your allies have to react and defend you. The fellowship cannot be broken. If the player with the ring disconnects or leaves the raid, the ring drops to the floor. If they are afk for more than 30s the ring falls to the floor.

It doesn't have to be a ring, it could be a ball or a rock, and you have to pass the item around the raid at set points. In this way it's not all about standard tank, heal, dps fights etc, it's adding a capture the flag type element to the game.

There was a glowy "ring" style element like you describe in the H Sha fight, sort of. Players with the glowy ball were the target of adds that one shot you if they got close, and you had to play hot potato to keep them running in circles.

Now, it wasn't the whole raid that was like that, but it was something similar.

Making WPvP attractive. ( and to make sure people won't get lazy we will be like, 1800/1800 Arena, 2200/2200 rated battleground 2700/2700 Weekly faction boss kill)
500Conquest points for weekly faction boss kill.

Better PvP rewards throughout the world.

It's a different game I know, but the Rift devs recently posted about world pvp and why they don't encourage it in their game and I really agree with the premise. In the long run, it's really hard to make world pvp attractive because players will find it more efficient to do instanced pvp for rewards, and it's even harder to balance because of the variables they can't account for--the unknown amount of players who will participate. Of course, some people enjoy the lack of balance and how unknown it is.

On-Topic: Blizzard has been introducing a lot of new mechanics and ideas into fights as of recent, but sadly they can't use the same mechanic more than once without people crying re-hash. Which is a total shame because I'd like them to re-visit some of my favorite mechanics and add a twist to it.

I wish there was a raid where you had 2 different partys on it... forex you will have the alliance and the horde going against Garrosh. Having 2 teams from different factions going at it at same time would be epic, but I bet that will never happen as it would be too dificult to setup such thing

Nearly every element in raid fights now can be described as something previously used before. Though the good thing is how they're used together in conjunction. Take Heroic Lei Shen, for instance. All of his mechanics can basically be described as spread out, or stack. Great, we were spreading out on stuff like Shazzrah after he got buffed in Molten Core like 8 years ago. But the way the mechanics are presented in their animation/models, or how they interact with each other, at least make them more interesting.

Now, that isn't to say that I don't appreciate or want interesting new ideas :P But basically all mechanics used nowadays being something we've seen before isn't the end of the world.

Read the Heroic Sha of Fear fight journal, it's similar to what you've described without being a free-for-all.

you're right, that is sort of what i was getting at as an idea mechanically but i meant it maybe as a sort of all encompassing theme to an instance. E.g. maybe it is a skull and you have to destroy it in the lava underneath orgrimmar, or something. So the entire team works out ok i will hold the skull for this fight. And it sort of dynamically changes the encounters based on who is holding it. just as an example

Originally Posted by carlosanjos

I wish there was a raid where you had 2 different partys on it... forex you will have the alliance and the horde going against Garrosh. Having 2 teams from different factions going at it at same time would be epic, but I bet that will never happen as it would be too dificult to setup such thing

that would be really cool. Or even two 5 man groups entering on opposite sides of the instance and race to get to the middle to tag the final boss. that might be a fun twist to spice it up.